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Madame, Please

Ingmar Bergman's production of "Madame de Sade" by Yukio Mishima (1992)

By Tom BakerPublished 3 years ago 11 min read
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Holding her riding crop, Madame de Simiane recounts the crimes of Marquis de Sade.

"Yes, I realize the Marquis de Sade is the fetus aborted by God."--Yukio Mishima, Madame de Sade (1965)

Madame de Sade is a play by Yukio Mishima, a Japanese playwright of no small repute. Mishima is a legendary character, a man who, before committing ritual suicide during an armed assault on a Japanese military installation, in which he took the commandant hostage, forged a brilliant and shining pathway (what we in the West call a "career") as an author and poet, an actor, model, political philosopher, filmmaker, mystic and universally hailed genius. His shining brilliance is offset by his radical politics, which were fanatically nationalistic, opposed to Western decadence, bourgeois capitalism as well as communism, and the erosion of what he considered traditionally and purely Japanese, fearing that his nation would devolve into a "rootless people."

Warrior, poet, and playwright: The literary Bushido, Yukio Mishima, who committed suicide in 1970 after taking a hostage at a military base.

With that in mind, one wonders what he found fascinating about Sade, whose life, a study in perversion, degeneracy, and the justification of amoral hedonism (not to mention Machiavellianism, atheism, materialism, Social Darwinism, and so on), saw him accorded the honorable distinction of lending his name to the common English term sadism; denoting, of course, extreme barbaric cruelty. The adjective sadistic of course referring to someone who takes a positive pleasure in inflicting such barbarous cruelty on others.

Sade did, indeed, enjoy inflicting such cruelty, most commonly on women; although his bisexual proclivities are fully known and attested to with pride through the various fictional mouthpieces he employed; scandalous and illegal confessions in those days.

Directed in 1992 by famed Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, staged at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, Madame de Sade features an all-female cast. Women, Sade's brutal sexual targets as well as, quite often, the heroes of his many fictions (Justine, Juliette). He may have loved and cherished the best examples while retaining a stark, unquenchable hatred or wrath for other objects, deemed "lesser" who, because of their vulnerability or low station as "whores," belonged to a species of woman ripe for predation; or one in which cruelty was justified, as their bodies, divorced from individuated "beingness" in his mind were simply objects for satiating his perverse desires. Whatever the case, we are treated to the image of the Baroness de Simiane (Margaretha Byström), who is a trousers-wearing female stand-in for Sade himself, bearing a riding crop.

She is every bit as unrepentant as he, sharing the same reputation. Discoursing with Comtesse de Saint-Fond (Agneta Ekmanner), later Sade's meddlesome stepmother, Madame de Montreuil (Anita Björk), (the one responsible for securing the later Lettre du cachet, which imprisoned him in a mental asylum), enters.

Baroness de Simiane recounts the orgiastic folly of the "little girls" affair, in which Sade fed a young woman an aniseed solution he told her was to cure "flatulence." It was his mixture of the aphrodisiac Spanish Fly. He then made her kneel, whipped her, and commanded her to give him...upwards of eight hundred lashes. She became violently ill due to the Spanish Fly, although she did not die. She swore out a warrant against him with the prosecutor instead.

His abuse of her, his homosexual arousal of his servant Latour, see him jailed and ultimately condemned to death. Madame de Montreuil enters, confesses she has determined to aid "Alphonse" as she can.

The poetic beauty of the drama's language is represented by such dialog as demonstrating how the first rays of the rising sun illuminate "the snow-white vulva" of a marble statue. Conversely, of course, the rays of the setting sunlight the posterior regions of the said statue. This beautiful, economical visual metaphor is utilized to allude to a simple act of anal sex; which the Baroness reminds Saint-Fond she is often accused, herself, of desiring.

BARONESS DE SIMIANE. "When the morning sun lights the front of a statue of Venus, standing in a park, the dazzling light penetrates right inside a snow-white vulva of marble. But when the sun, having circled the garden for half a day, sinks beneath the trees, which part of Venus do the sun's rays penetrate?"

COMTESSE DE SAINT-FOND. "Only a devil would do something like that!"

Devil or not, Madame de Montreuil is determined that they should help her unrepentant, wild rakehell of a son-in-law, who once sucked the blood from her hand when she pricked herself on a thorn. She describes him as "charming and silly," yet freely concedes the genius that walks hand in hand with his madness.

Sade is described, again and again, in terms that hearken to the vampiric.

He tore the still-beating heart from a rabbit, looking at it in a kind of rapt attention and wonder; as if he were alien to the concept of both death and pain; as if he were trying to grasp that it, too, was held hostage to the mortification, the mutilation of the flesh. Baroness de Simiane during Act One confesses Sade's obsession with numerals, as "they are the only thing that cannot be refuted." (All else, God, country, morality, duty, ethics, compassion, everything else seems an abstraction but numeric values; and, of course, pain. Sade is like an alien scientist, described as looking at the world through a "long telescope", a lens in which what he pinpoints, be it the value of numeric calculations or the number of lashes meted out to him by a convenient whore, are all that exist in his conscious sphere of observation.)

Baroness de Simiane offers to use sexual favors to help get Sade's sentence overturned. Madame de Sade enters, Renee Pelagie (Stina Ekblad), and confesses to her mother, in a manner suggestive of Sade's bizarre, Svengali-like hold over this coterie of women, that he is like "a piece of music with a single movement." Further, that she is "sworn to listen to the sounds of that music," as her wifely duty, but that he never makes her listen "to the sounds of the lashes."

The manner of devotion accorded this man, who arouses an ambivalent reaction of awe and disgust as if Sade were natural phenomena that must be accorded investigation, if not admiration, is what draws Pelagie, her sister Anne (played by Marie Richardson, Anne has escaped with Sade to Sardinia, becoming his lover, Sade never asking her "whether I wanted it or not"), Madame de Montreuil and Comtesse de Saint-Fond inexorably to dissatisfaction and loss.

"Your husband isn't a human!". Madame de Montreuil (Anita Björk) and Renee (Stina Ekblad) argue violently in MAdame de Sade (1992).

Black Mass

Madame de Saint-Fond enters again, by Act 3, dressed in a mask, like a character from a Fellini picture. Her wrists are scarred, almost in mockery of the wounds of Christ. She intones: "A woman's hands, a woman's patience, can even turn Hell into roses!" When Renee's mother reproaches her for being so devoted to a man she observes has "treated her daughters so disgracefully," Renee replies--

His desire flares up like a sacrilege, like when a horse is excited by trampling the frozen grass. That's why he always follows a fixed pattern: he lets the muddy waters of a cold morning crystalize into sacred ice that he crushes underfoot. Whores are momentarily turned into saints so that he can whip them. The next moment, the dream is torn to shreds. Then he gets rid of the whores and beggars. And he has no one to feed the honey of tenderness he has collected inside, after these moments of rapture. Then, he returns to me. Under the dazzling sun, he toils to collect the honey of tenderness and bestows it on me where I'm waiting in the cool, dark hive.

She says this with a rapt look of almost hypnotic wonder or transcendence on her face. Her sister Anne reacts contemptuously, but neither of them regards themselves as ill-used by Sade. Later, Madame de Saint-Fonde will contemptuously accuse both of them of being tools, as well as herself.

Madame de Saint-Fond recounts being used as a "living altar" in a black mass. Here, Mishima references the "Chambre Ardente" affair during the reign of Louis the 16th, in which the fortune teller Catherine Deshayes, also known as "La Voison," and her accomplices were put on trial for murder and performing abortions for aristocratic hypocrites who paraded as the pinnacle of moral rectitude, all the while indulging in the sort of orgiastic and depraved vices that Sade scrupulously gathered data upon in his literary work.

The timeline of events seems jumbled, but it is revealed that a court order pardoning and freeing Sade came much earlier in the year, without Renee being informed of it. Instead, Madame de Montreuil used the opportunity to imprison the monstrous man in an even worse dungeon at Vincennes, on the grounds of mental insanity.

Madame de Montreuil berates her daughter, who defiantly maintains that she will stand by her man (to quote Tammy Wynette.) She then violently castigates her defiant daughter, shaking her, telling her he husband is "not human," and asking her what has become of her "womanly pride." Indeed, the four women most affected by standing within the whirling chasm of the Marquis seem to have lost all sense of self; Renee sees in Sade a sort of gateway to a higher purpose, to God, calling him cryptically, bizarrely a "white dove." Using this image of peace with him seems wildly at odds with the truth.

Renee violently condemns her for what she believes is her hypocrisy. Describing Madame de Montreuil's sex life with Renee's father as "a key to fit a perfect keyhole," she condemns her for the odious whiff of her two-faced values, which condemns the perversity of others while sanctifying a loveless, passionless marriage bed.

Sade, never seen, thrust into the background as a being conjured by poetic rumination, and an abstract concept, does, indeed, seem the inhuman, possessing revenant, blood-thirsty vampire, de Montreuil accuses him of being.

At the end of the play, all have been unalterably transformed by the demon energy, the whirlwind of the Marquis, who remains a curious, puzzling void: Renee Pelagie joins a convent, in a bizarre real-life counterpoint to the fictional Sadeian woman, Juliet; Her sister Rose joins her husband in Italy; Madame de Montreuil has now lost both her daughters. Baroness de Simiane likewise joins the sisterhood.

A more grotesque fate, being trampled by a mob, awaits Comtesse Saint-Fond.

(A domestic, Charlotte, the first actress on stage, played with mouse-like timidity by Helena Brodin, is changed by this ending on an internal level. She spends the play quietly observing the distraught, decimated lives of her "betters"; i.e. the ruling class. What, one wonders, was the subtext Mishima, a staunch anti-Marxist, trying to relate here?)

Currently, a well-known conservative politician is accused of sex-trafficking a minor, along with other alleged crimes. Like a character from Sade, this man projects a veneer of moral rectitude, of "traditional values", that may mask a bottomless well of hypocritical intrigue and nefarious wrongdoings.

The Sade of Madame de Sade is less well-fleshed than this living man; is, in point of fact, unfleshed, except only in anecdote and observation; in memory. In other words, the "illusion" of him, the idea, the creation. He is described as shirtless, wearing a black cape, chasing girls with a whip; hanging his wife from the rafters, bleeding, for a servant to "Lick clean."

He is an abstraction; a void. He is the investigation on the part of something ineffable, indefinable; accused of being supernatural.

His women, like Dracula's wives, seem to be a living dead, alternately blessing and cursing him, speaking of him with dripping, mellifluous poetry, before describing his atrocities. They are shell-shocked; they have rediscovered some primitive, atavistic impulse; the impulse toward death and pain.

It is a puzzle as to what the staunchly militant right-wing and nationalistic Japanese Yukio Mishima might have seen in this sordid stuff. Was it an indictment of Western values? An examination of strength and subservience? Did the tragedy of Sade's life, the miasma of his existence, somehow intrigue the young genius and future suicide? The abomination of tradition is what Sade represents; Mishima represents a desire to purge such decadence and cultural degeneration. On the surface, it would seem to be not his story.

Be that as it may, Bergman's understated direction, the deep silences of the play (punctuated only occasionally by traditional Japanese string playing) are still eerie, quiet, and effective. The lesson it teaches, that what defames and degrades us, ultimately destroying us, as total individuated beings, can also be the thing in which we feel our greatest deliverance. In which we see our salvation, clinging to most relentlessly.

And this can be in regards to a sadistic pervert, or a seemingly noble politician, who still commands an audience, even though he is roundly suspected of infamies.

There's a line from the TV movie of Helter Skelter (1976), where Charles Manson (played to perfection by Steve Railsback) says to the prosecutor, Bugliosi (George DiCenzo), "You beat a man with a whip, and he likes the whip, you're just making a fool of yourself, partner."

People do like the whip. Hit them once, twice, or a hundred times, they'll often come back, begging for more. And this was true of the men and women of Sadeian times, and it is just as true today. C'est la vie.

Madame de Sade can be viewed for free on YouTube:

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About the Creator

Tom Baker

Author of Haunted Indianapolis, Indiana Ghost Folklore, Midwest Maniacs, Midwest UFOs and Beyond, Scary Urban Legends, 50 Famous Fables and Folk Tales, and Notorious Crimes of the Upper Midwest.: http://tombakerbooks.weebly.com

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